


Under the Arched Sky

by onlystars



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Gen, Long-Distance Friendship, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Protective Dean Winchester, apocalypse by epidemic, trials by literal fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-20 17:50:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4796645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlystars/pseuds/onlystars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turns out the world ends with a whimper after all. Dean sets out to search for Sam with only a radio, a vague hope, and the voice of a man he's never met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Arched Sky

**Author's Note:**

> "It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us."  
> \- John Ruskin. 
> 
> A revised older fic, originally posted on my blog at firebugg.tumblr.com.

_i._

Turns out the world ends with a whimper after all.

Doomsayers recite Eliot in the streets and churches proclaim Judgment Day and Dean could just _scream_ at the poetic, prophetic bullshit of it. He doesn’t. Instead, he does what Winchesters do: takes the burden onto his steady shoulders, and tries to save people.

But he can’t. Not this time.

 

_ii._

Revelation — the bitter name that sticks to the virus like honey — spreads in a manner of weeks, leaving utter devastation in its wake. Dean spends his days helping out at the Town Hall and his nights trying to reach Sammy’s phone in Palo Alto, but the communication networks overload with desperate calls first, and then go down pretty fast with no one to run the power stations. There is no cure, no vaccine, no information on where the plague came from. And, in the end, no hope.

Sickness does not touch Dean, which makes no sense, given that he burns the dead and feeds painkillers to the dying. He moves mechanically, half-blind with panic over Sam, who he has not been able to contact, until there are no more dying because they are all, every one of them, dead. And Dean is left alone.

He touches Bobby’s cool cheek, apologizes to the hundreds of rotting bodies he is unable to burn, and leaves. He loads the Impala with clothes, water, and Dad’s old shotgun. After a moment of staring at the sky, he steals a long-distance radio, setting it to the frequency he and Sam whispered along when they were children playing at soldiers. If he’s immune, then chances are Sam is as well. Dean starts the engine — the Impala’s purr rips across the silence of Lawrence like an open wound — and begins the drive to California.

 

_iii._

There are things he doesn’t account for. Three days into his journey, he smells fire in his sleep, awakening the old nightmare that he can never leave behind. Dean jerks upright to find Colorado burning. When he tries to find a different route, skin singing a single taut note — get out, get away, get  _out_ — he finds that huge swathes Wyoming and New Mexico are also gone. He suspects most of the country is the same. The chemical factories break down, releasing their toxic shit into the air, and the resulting fire is hungry enough to erase the heavens. The sun is reduced to a sickly bulb in a concrete sky; the moon is little more than a half-forgotten daydream. The stars that he and Sam watched together as children drown in a dirty gray — another link to his brother severed.

Going is very slow. Dean stops every few minutes to batter a car out of the way, or burn a body that’s out in the open. They’re starting to decompose, and the stench is apocalyptic. It would be easier to simply run over their swollen limbs and ignore the way they burst like balloons under his tires, but Dean can’t bear the thought. There are no people to save, anymore, but he can at least pay them this one last respect. He avoids towns and cities — he may be inexplicably immune to Revelation (and isn’t that a thought that keeps him wide-eyed at night, unable to fathom how he somehow conned his way into more life while billions of more deserving people have returned to dust), but he isn’t so lucky in other respects. In Arizona he doesn’t sanitize his hands fast enough after burning a body, and gets taken down for a week with dysentery. The back roads are better for the corpse situation but are prone to fire, and more than once Dean is forced back several hundred miles as he tries to plot a new course. The entire time his heart pumps in his ears, a steady beat of _samsamsam_ that thrums low and terrified through his dreams.

 

_iv._

“Sammy? You there?” Dean says into the radio every night. The fact that Sam hasn’t replied doesn’t mean anything at all. He might not have thought of a radio. He might be weathering it out in a shelter. He might be too busy helping people, in the way that Sam does. 

Yes. The silence means nothing. “I miss you, man. Get your ass on the airwaves.”

His only reply is a lonely howl of static, too loud for this new and desolate world.

 

_v._

He runs into two other survivors – one, a tall dark man who hefts a shotgun and orders him out of the town. Dean complies without a word. Desperation and fear make people do stupid things, and Dean can’t think about other people until he has Sam safe by his side. The other survivor is a small blond girl who takes one look at him and bolts, hair rippling behind her in the dry breeze. Dean chases her, calling out clumsy platitudes — Christ, a little girl all alone, he can’t possibly ignore that — but she’s quick, and slashes at him with a rusted kitchen knife when he reaches out to her. The bright bite of pain shocks him after so many weeks of miserable haze. He staggers, holding the flesh of his arm together, and she slips away. The wound gets bound up with bandages he finds in a convenience store, but it throbs every time he moves his arm, and after a week starts to weep pus. Dean takes a shitload of penicillin, hopes to fuck that it doesn’t get too infected, and pushes on.

Every night he dreams of fire.

 

_vi._

“Sammy? You there?” A single point of light is visible in the sky tonight, and Dean squints at it as he dangles the radio in his hands, waiting helplessly for silence.

Static cracks at him. “Hello?”

Dean nearly drops it in shock — how long has it been since he’s heard a voice? four weeks? five? — and then rips a fingernail in his hurry to answer. “Sam?”

There is a long beat of silence, in which Dean already knows the answer like a punch to the gut. “No. I don’t know anyone of that name.” Another pause. “I’m sorry.”

The voice is male, deep, and kind of raspy. It’s not Sam, but it’s an honest to God _person_ , and that feels good; damn good. “No, dude, it’s fine,” he blurts, hands white-knuckled around the radio. “Not like I own this channel. Nice to know I’m not the only person on the planet.”

“Yes,” the man says, and falls silent. Dean wants to scream — he finally makes contact with someone and not only are they not Sam, they can’t hold a conversation to save their life, how fucking unfair is that?

“I thought I was alone,” the man finally says, and the tremor in his voice is so relieved that Dean almost —  _almost_  — forgives him for not being his brother. “That I might be the only one left.”

“Well, it’s you plus Dean Winchester now. And I’ve seen one or two other people.”

There’s a sharp exhalation on the other side of the line. It releases a burst of static right into Dean’s ear, but he doesn’t even mind. “Thank God. Immunity must be based on some sort of genetic fluke. Something in the blood.”

“You’ll find that thanking God is pretty low on my list of things to do, buddy,” Dean says, but there’s no edge to his words — it’s genetic,  _it’s genetic_ , Sam is still alive, Sam has to be alive, it’s in their blood, he’s  _safe_. All Dean has to do is find him.

“Well, you’re alive. That’s something to be grateful for.”

It means nothing without Sam.

“Whatever.” Dean doesn’t really want to get into an argument over something as pointless as religion with one of the last people left on the planet. “What’s your name, anyways?”

“Castiel,” the man says. Dean blinks, but hey. It’s the end of the world; people are allowed to be weird. “And apocalypse or not, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Hey, c'mon, it isn’t the apocalypse,” Dean says, somewhat hypocritical given that he’s spent the past week thinking about how _Contagion_ got it wrong. He just hopes that they’re not in Steven King’s apocalypse. No weird hand-of-god, deus-ex-machina intervention needed, thank you. “We’d need hellfire and shit for that.”

“Obviously, you’re not in California,” Cas says darkly, and before Dean can seize on that, there’s a strong pulse of static. “The whole state is in flames. In fact, the fire’s moving quickly again. I need to go. San Francisco is already flattened.”

Dean is already yelling, lips forming around the words  _Sam_ and  _have you seen_ and _don’t leave I only just found you_ , but Castiel doesn’t reply, even hours later. Dean sits in his car, speaking into nothing, throat dry and tight and choked. There are no stars anymore — no light from anything, except clouds tinged a dull red from fire over the horizon. Dean touches the amulet at his neck, and feels isolation settle into his bones.

 

_vii._

He spends the next day staring at the radio and pacing in front of the Impala. Chances are good that Sam isn’t in California anymore. Winchesters do not like fire. And Sam would never succumb to it – Dean feels that as strong as the gravity clutching him to Earth. They’ve already walked through the flames as children, baptized by smoke and their father’s arms and the feathery flutter of ash against their eyes. Death will come to them another way, him and Sam, and he doesn’t care, as long as they’re together. But they’re not, now, and he feels the absence sharp like a blade under his skin. Alone, alone, he’s  _sick_ with it.

The radio spits at him for a moment, and then Castiel’s voice comes through — quiet, like he’s afraid he’s speaking into a void.

“Dean?”

Dean lunges forward. “I’m here.”

Castiel exhales shakily. “Good. That’s — good.”

They’re silent for a moment. Dean listens to the rasp of Castiel’s breath filtering through the air, and to his surprise feels the keen slice of Sam’s absence dull a little.

“I’m sorry I left so fast yesterday,” Castiel says finally. “I’ve already had two buildings come down on top of me. I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.”

Unbidden, Dean’s mind flashes to what his mother would have felt, trapped in their burning house while his father beat and the door and cried himself mute.

He swallows. “Do you… are you near Palo Alto? My brother’s at Stanford. I have to find him.”

“Palo Alto is next to San Franciso, Dean. It burned. There’s nothing there.” A pause — probably as Castiel realizes how that sounded. “But I doubt your brother was there when it hit. As soon as Revelation came, he probably started making his way back to you. California’s a dying coast.”

Dean scrubs at his mouth. Castiel is right. He should head back to Lawrence; back to any place Sam might connect to home.

“How come you’re still there? You said the place was torched.”

“Yes, I’m…” Castiel clears his throat, and Dean doesn’t know the guy, but he’d be willing to bet that he’s embarrassed. “I’m keeping ahead of the fire. Going to as many museums as I can. There are things that don’t deserve to be lost.”

That twists something ( _sam_ ) inside him, makes him lash out a little bit. “ _Things_ don’t mean much without anyone to appreciate them. Don’t you have people to save?”

“There  _are_  no people to save,” Castiel says. And the thing is, he could have been angry — Dean gets that a lot; Sam says he has an  _abrasive personality_ and  _no interpersonal skills_ , although Dean is more of the opinion that most people just can’t handle his swag — or frustrated or even suicidal. Instead, he just sounds sad. Sorrowful, perhaps, though Dean’s never had cause or desire to use that word before. “Not here. Not anymore. I spent weeks at the hospital watching people die because nobody could save them. This is the next best thing I can do.”

Dean sits there and feels like a dick for a moment before pulling himself together. “That’s fair enough, Cas.”

Silence. And then, carefully neutral: “No one’s ever called me that before.”

“First time for everything,” Dean says, smiling a little, and points the Impala back towards home.

 

_viii._

Basically, the end of the world fucking sucks. The corpses don’t even both Dean anymore — there’s thousands of them, millions, and as time drags on and they begin to rot they become less and less recognizable as the living, breathing, loving human beings they must have been once. Or perhaps he’s becoming colder. Either way, he no longer has to pull over to throw up whenever he passes a town.

It’s everything else, really, every single thing. Dean can be fine for days, fed only on canned hot dogs and Cas’ gleeful transmission that the fire didn’t reach the sea lion cave near Klamath and a mantra of  _samsamsam_ ; can forget that everything has been swept away, like an ocean deciding that a sandcastle has stood for long enough. But then he’ll see something — a bike overturned on the highway, a cross by the side of the road, a purple hoodie snagged on a tree — and the sheer  _loss,_ the realization that it’s gone, strikes him like a blow. All of it gone. There are billions of people who will never walk down a street bathed in afternoon light again. Like they never existed, because who’s left to remember them?

“ _We_  are,” Cas says when Dean voices the thought, startling him. He doesn’t even remember turning the radio on. But they’ve been checking in with each other every evening, just a couple minutes of conversation before facing their own silent worlds again, and it’s quickly becoming a habit. “And we will.”

 

 _ix._  
“You sound unwell,” Cas tells him one day after he loses his train of thought three times.

“Yeah, I have a fever and shit.” His arm hurts like a bitch too, but Dean wasn’t brought up to whine.

“A fever?” Dean really doesn’t like that note of suppressed alarm in Cas’ voice. “You’ve been breathing fast the last two times I talked to you. What else is there?”

“Um.” Dean focuses on his hands, which are shaking without his permission. “Stop that,” he tells them out loud, and hears Cas make a muted sound in the background. Crap.

“Check your pulse.”

“But-”

“ _Now,_ Dean.”

Dean holds two fingers to his neck and promptly loses count. “It’s fast,” he says helplessly. His hand slips off the steering wheel, jamming his wound against the side of the door, and he grunts in pain. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Do you have any infections?” Cas is asking in the background — not even reprimanding him for blasphemy like usual, so either they’ve reached another point in their friendship (can he call it that yet?) or Dean is in serious trouble. Probably both.

“Yeah. My arm.”

Silence. Then Cas speaks, sounding irritated. “Oh, you’re one of  _those_ patients. What, exactly, happened?”

“I got knifed a while ago,” Dean says, shivering. When did it get so cold? It’s not even September yet. “Little girl slashed at me while I was trying to help her. It’s kind of yellow and gross. Not healing right. I’ve been taking penicillin.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then: “Dean, listen to me very carefully,” Cas says, low and urgent. “Go to a hospital, right now.”

Dean scowls. “There are no doctors anymore, genius, what’s it going to do for me?”

“ _I’m_ a doctor,” Cas snaps. “Now do it before you pass out from blood poisoning and die, or is taking care of yourself too inconvenient for you?”

“Douche,” Dean mutters, blinking as the world tilts.

“I heard that.”

“Good.” But Dean yanks the wheel and pulls off at the nearest hospital he can find, barely noticing when the Impala’s right mirror is ripped off as he rounds a corner. He falls out the driver’s door, black flowers blooming before his eyes; staggers as he follows Castiel’s increasingly terse instructions to the supply room.

“Cas,” he slurs, “there’s about forty billion bottles with ridiculous names in here-”

“Vancomycin.”

The labels are blurring weirdly before his eyes, mocking him and the dyslexia all his teachers thought he had growing up. Which was a blatant fucking misdiagnosis if Dean’s ever heard one — maybe he’d have been interested if they’d picked Vonnegut or Heller or Wallace or something  _worthwhile_ — but that’s all in another world now, and at least Lawrence High School had done right by Sammy, so-

“Dean, stop talking and  _concentrate._ ”

“Concentrate your face,” Dean counters vaguely, picking up an IV pack. It begins with ‘v’ and ends in a smear to his eyes. Good enough.

“How scathing,” Cas says, dry and tense. “Get to a bed.”

The tiles are rapidly coming up to meet Dean’s face. “That’s a negative,” he mumbles into the floor, and wonders what the rules are on sleeping in public spaces these days. That’s right. There are no rules, and he can do _whatever he wants_. Which is to sleep.

Castiel’s panic is betrayed only by his clipped words. “Okay. Alright. It’s going to hurt, but you have to insert it into the vein in your wrist. Make sure the pack is elevated above you.”

“M'trying,” Dean murmurs, but the tube keeps slipping through his fingers and he can’t feel his arm anyways, so it’s anyone’s guess if he actually stabs it through. He hopes he actually put the pack on a shelf above him; he can’t remember. “S'cold.”

“ _Dean_ ,” Cas is saying, far away. “Stay with me, don’t fall asleep-”

 

_x._

When he comes to, the world is dark and veined at the edges, but smooth planes are no longer bright with the sheen of fever. He feels like death, but the IV pack is empty and his arm doesn’t feel like a furnace anymore. It is at least, he can see through a sliver of hospital window, a solid twelve hours later.

“Dean,  _say something_ , you have to wake up, you can’t die, not you, you’re the only person I have,  _wake up_ ,” Cas is babbling into the cold air, “please be okay, please, God…”

Dean fumbles for the transmission button, tongue fat and heavy in his mouth. “No formal titles necessary. ‘Dean’ will do just fine,” he jokes weakly, then doubles over and throws up onto the tiles.

 

_xi._

Cas scolds him for the next week about traveling when he should be healing.

“I’m sticking my tongue out at you,” Dean tells him one morning, jamming another drip into his arm as he navigates a car-strewn freeway. “And it’s gonna my middle finger soon if you don’t shut it.”

He feels Cas rolling his eyes from the other side of the country, and manages a grin.

 

_xii._

Sam isn’t at Bobby’s old house in Sioux Falls, or the ancient Campbell home, or in Lawrence when he doubles back to check.

“He’s not dead,” Dean tells Cas one night, after standing in Chicago’s main square and screaming Sam’s name into the gathering dusk. “I know he’s not.”

“I believe you,” Cas says, so sincere Dean could kiss him.

 

_xiii._

They talk for hours now. Well, Dean talks, and Cas mostly listens — quiet, intense, attentive. Dean tells him about Sam, about Dad, about their house in Lawrence with the green door and the tree that he and Sam would climb when they were kids, branches whipping into their eyes and the air bright with the taste of exhilaration. He tells him about Dad’s car crash and the bits he remembers of his mother, with her golden hair and kind eyes and boundless heart. He tells him about raising Sammy on his own with Dad gone on business so often — the summers that they would spend every moment together, world breaking over them like water over a rock; the endless fights, every bone in his body groaning with fury and grief and a burning resentment at all that he’d given up for this unknowable boy, who meant more to him than his own heart; the reconciliations that had them watching the stars together, closer than ever.

It feels good to talk, good to spill out things that he’s kept inside his whole life. He tells Cas about the watches and knives and presents he shoplifted for Sam. The men and women he fucked and never called again. The life he spent unsure of what he wanted, at turns resentful of his family and so desperate for them he could barely breathe. Cas listens, and accepts, and does not judge, and Dean can’t help but kind of adore him for it.

 

_xiv._

“Why us, Cas?” he asks, mouth bitter with the waste of it all. The road looks ravaged under the muffled sun, and he misses Sam like a phantom limb. He’s taken to spraying messages in the main squares of every town he comes across —  _still alive, bitch, & looking for you, DW _—but the country feels wider and emptier every time he crosses it. “What makes our blood so different? Why do we get to live?”

Cas sighs, and it comes through as a familiar, comforting pop of static.

“If you say 'God’s plan’, I will come over there to California and hit you.” He’s only half-joking.

“I wasn’t,” Cas mutters, and there’s no laughter in his words. “I’m – I don’t know about that, anymore. If it’s right to have faith when all this has happened.”

“Well, I do know one thing about faith,” Dean says, knowing that he sounds hopelessly bitter. “If you don’t have it, it can’t disappoint you.”

“Not everyone is your father, Dean.” Cas sounds sad,  _unbearably_  sad, like Dean’s fucked up history is enough to break his heart. “You’ll find that people can surprise you.”

“Maybe,” Dean says, feeling like a dick  _again_  because this conversation wasn’t supposed to be about him, and shuts his trap. After a minute, there’s a rustling sound. Dean can imagine Cas standing at a window or a sea cliff, sounding out his words in his head before he says them.

“I don’t know why it was us, Dean. I’d guess that Revelation was a weapon. It doesn’t matter from who — they’re probably dead now too. It spread too suddenly, and the symptoms came in everyone at once. It wasn’t natural. Or maybe it was God. Maybe this is Judgment Day. But I doubt it.”

“It doesn’t feel fair that so many good people are in the ground and I’m still walking around.”

“If you’re still walking around, then good people still exist on this earth,” Cas says calmly, oblivious to the way Dean’s breath catches in his throat. “And for that, divine intervention or not, I’m very grateful.”

 

_xv._

In turn, Cas sometimes offers bit of himself. He was on his way to being a surgeon when Revelation hit, and despite that had never seen an episode of  _Dr. Sexy._ Dean spends two hours trying to explain its complexities to Cas, who utterly fails to grasp why it’s so absorbing: “But doctors don’t actually have sex in on-call rooms, Dean. It’s unhygienic.” This leaves Dean spluttering over the destruction of many a fantasy and ignoring the way his stomach stutters over the rumble of Cas’ voice. He isn’t thirteen, for God’s sake.

Cas comes from a large family that disowned him years ago ( _various reasons_ , he says, and moves on), and he had a twin that died a few years ago. This bit of information is delivered quietly, detached. Dean doesn’t know what to say to it, and so doesn’t say anything. They sit in silence for a while, while Cas watches the sunset and Dean watches night seep into the sky. It’s comfortable, somehow.

Dean learns other things, slowly. Cas loves cheeseburgers. He has blue eyes. He wishes he could fly. He had loved working with children, before all of this.

His laughter is rare, but when Dean teases it out of him the whole day feels warmer.

 

_xvi._

“I miss the stars,” Cas tells him one night after an hour of listening to each other breathe. “I feel lost without them.”

Dean pushes back the ragged hem of his hotel curtain; looks at the grey roiling of the sky. He sees the stars occasionally, but only as faint wisps drowned in the oppressive sea of the horizon. Nothing like the blazing, aching wonder that he and Sam had watched together as children, pressed so close that their ribs slotted together and breath came as one. It’s depressing, and makes sweat break out in the hollow of his back. This world really is dying.

“It’s not fair that we should lose the earth and the heavens at the same time,” Cas says quietly. “Galileo once said that he loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. But I don’t feel that way now. It’s like the sky is crushing me. Like we’ve been left alone in this world.”

Dean shakes himself out of his own morbid thinking, and keeps his tone light. “Jesus, Cas, that’s depressing. We’re not the only ones left, you know that, right?”

Cas is silent for a moment. “I know. But I… I went into a hospital nursery today, looking for medicine. It was a mistake. Sometimes it’s hard to ignore how thoroughly everything is gone.”

Dean imagines rows of tiny skeletons, swaddled in bright pinks and blues, and shudders.

“I know, Cas, believe me. But we’ll rebuild. We always do. You know why? Cus humans can be some serious dickbags, but we’re also, not to toot our own horn too much, pretty awesome. The clouds’ll clear someday soon. We’ll get to see the stars again. We’ll get the  _world_ back again. I promise. We’ll get through this. There’s you and me — and Sam, when we find him. And we’ll find the other survivors, and we’ll build it up again. It’ll be a pretty pathetic day when humanity gets its ass kicked by a fucking  _germ_.”

There’s another long moment of quiet, in which Dean has ample time to reflect on all the ways he just sounded like a complete idiot, and then there’s a soft huffing sound, which —

“Are you  _laughing_? What’s so funny? Stop ruining my inspirational speech, you dick!”

“I’m not laughing at you,” Cas says, and Dean can feel him smiling from all these many miles away. “Never at you. I believe you could rebuild the world by yourself if you ever put your mind to it, Dean Winchester.”

Really, it’s not fair how often Cas leaves him speechless.

 

 _xvii.  
_ Dean lingers in Lawrence for a week, burning bodies and waiting for Sam, until he feels steeped in death and has a nightmare of his mother withering into ash again. Then he hightails to Massachusetts, where Sam once wanted to live after his first time swimming in the ocean. Sam isn’t there — isn’t  _anywhere,_ it seems — but the dock they dove off as children is. Dean stands on the rotted wood for hours, reveling in the taste of salt on his lips instead of ash.

 

 _xviii.  
_ Dean thinks of Cas when he touches himself now. Thinks of the gravel of his voice, of the awkward lilt to his speech, of his carefully chosen words. Thinks of blue eyes, compassion, grace. Even with no idea of what Cas looks like, he imagines him writhing under his hands, that voice calling out not to God, not to the Lord, but to Dean, for Dean to  _touch me, please, I’m yours, please, a-ah!_

Dean comes with his hand on his dick and Cas on his lips, but his body aches for something more than ghosts.

 

_xix._

Dean lasts until he hits Virginia for the second time, and then cracks. It feels like fire under his skin, his need for Sam, the weight of his little brother by his arm.

“Cas, please. You have to check Palo Alto. I’m at least fifteen days out from there, twenty if the lingering traffic is bad, and I can’t wait any longer, he’s not  _anywhere_ , I just have to make sure that there’s nothing there. Or his –” The sting of bile surges to his throat. “- his body. I have to know.”

“I told you, Dean. The whole place was on fire. The buildings are halfway to collapsing and there’s nothing there.” Cas’ voice softens, filled with something Dean can’t think about now. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

“Cas,  _please_.”

A hesitation. “Dean, the last time I went into a building touched by fire, it collapsed. It took fourteen hours to claw myself out, and then I had to reset my dislocated shoulder without assistance or anesthetic.” Castiel’s voice shakes, just a little, and Dean knows this, knows what he’s asking, because he fears fire just as much and he  _remembers_ that day, when Cas had come onto the line later than normal and tightly mentioned that he wouldn’t be going near the burned museums again.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, but you’re the only one I can. What if he’s—” He can’t breathe. “I can’t stand this anymore, Cas, I  _can’t_ , I don’t know what to _do_. I’m going crazy—”

“Sam’s alive, and he’s looking for you too. Have faith—”

“Don’t you  _dare_ tell me that,” Dean bites back, frustrated and hating everything. “Not when I was just beginning to have faith in  _you_  and you’re bailing on me the first time I actually _ask_ you for something.”

It’s not fair, and he knows it’s not fair the moment it leaves his mouth. Cas exhales sharply, like Dean has struck him, and before he can open his mouth to backtrack, talk this out, the line goes dead.

“Cas?  _Cas_ , c'mon.”

No answer. And this time, the silence goes deeper than bone.

 

 _xx.  
_ The radio remains silent for three days. Dean barely eats anything and doesn’t shut his eyes in case he sees his family consumed by raw flame.

 

 _xxi.  
_ He’s in Denver when Cas comes through, coughing like he’s about to hack up a lung.

“Dean, are you there? I’m outside Palo Alto.”

Dean hits the brakes and screeches to a halt in the middle of the highway, radio shaking in his hands. “You  _what_? Cas, you actually went?”

“Of course I did,” Cas says, like there was never another possible outcome to their conversation. “You asked me to.”

And it’s terrifying, this loyalty that Dean’s done nothing to earn. “Cas, look, I-”

“He isn’t there,” Cas says over him, sounding particularly hoarse. Dean gets a flash of what it must have been like, wading through stone scorched white and the blackened remains of fallen college kids and nearly throws up again. “I looked through the entire dorm complex, Dean, but I couldn’t find him. I’m sorry.” He coughs.

He still doesn’t know where Sam is. And now Cas has gone risked his life over something that Dean knew was a dead end anyways.

“But,” Cas says, “There was—”

“ _No_ ,” Dean says. “No. I shouldn’t have pressured you into doing that. Something is wrong with me, that I asked you.”

“But there was something-”

“No, Cas, let me say it. I know better than to use people I care about — I wouldn’t do that to Sam, and I shouldn’t have done it to you. It won’t happen again. I was lying when I said I was only beginning to have faith in you. I’m not one for God or religion but I  _do_ believe in you, and that sounds so fucking corny I can’t believe I just said it, but I do, and we’re not even in the same place so I can’t even ask you not to leave because that would be ridiculous, but I just — I’m sorry.”

There’s dead silence for about twenty seconds on the other end, and Dean waits it out, the radio cutting grooves into his fingers where he grips it like a lifeline.

“Dean,” Cas breathes, sounding wrecked, and there’s no way that Dean deserves the warmth in his voice, that level of awe. “I—” He stops, and Dean can feel him collecting himself. “There are… a lot of things I would like to say to that, but you should know that you were right. Sam left a message for you.”

Everything fades out for a second, and when the world returns Cas is still speaking. “—looked like it had been painted a while ago, but definitely after the fire. It said 'Detroit’.”

Dean can’t imagine what Sam is doing in Detroit, doesn’t care. Everything is shining, his hands are light, the scattered stars of his mind are starting to form into the night sky he remembered as a child again.

“You know,” Cas says, “if we were in the same place you could ask me not to leave.” He slows, and Dean can just imagine him staring down at his hands as he deliberates his next words. “I wouldn’t, of course.”

“What?” This day is too good to be true, Winchesters don’t  _have_ days like this, where the world may be in ruins but it feels like there might be something like hope on the horizon.

“Maybe we should be in the same place,” Cas repeats, and Dean’s pretty sure his grin would put a sun to shame.

 

 _xxii.  
_ Castiel reaches the meeting point first, of course. He’s on the hood of his car by the time Dean arrives, long limbs splayed across the metal, throat tilted in an unbroken line as he studies the first clear night in months.

Dean climbs out of the Impala, fingertips buzzing with nerves and a light high that comes from something untouchable suddenly so close.

The stars spread a faint nimbus of light around Castiel’s head, edging his features in silver. He’s silent, bright, face turning to look at Dean. His eyes are the color of a sky that doesn’t exist anymore. Dean wonders blindly how in all their conversations Cas failed to mention just how breathtaking he is.

They’re still for a moment, sharing a look that makes Dean’s skin hum with the intensity of Cas’ stare, dark and calm and infinite. Cas doesn’t seem in any hurry to talk, and inclines his head slightly at the spot next to him. Dean settles into place beside him, presses the warm line of their arms together, and studies the night sky. It’s something he never imagined doing without Sam, but it feels comfortable here, with Cas an anchor by his side.

“Gemini is out tonight,” Cas offers quietly, clear and confident without the warp of the radio between them. “It’s one of my favorites. I can never decide if it outshines Orion or not.”

“I can’t tell most of the constellations,” Dean admits. “Sam knows them all, every one. I make new ones up.”

Castiel looks at him from the corner of his eye, mouth tugging up in a beautiful smirk. “I wouldn’t expect anything else from you,” he says, sounding so unbearably affectionate that Dean almost turns away from something that open, that unreserved. But the sky is ablaze for the first time he can remember, and he has a lead on Sam, and Cas is  _here_ , finally, with all his otherworldly finesse for turning things upside down. So, instead, Dean twines their fingers together, and fistpumps internally when he sees Castiel’s eyes widen and then crinkling at the edges as they curve up.

“We’ll find him, you know,” Cas says, and raises Dean’s palm to his lips. The kiss he places there is gentle, adoring; a song different to fire and ash and heartbreak, different to everything Dean knows. It strikes a new chord in him, a smoldering harmony that unfolds and takes wing.

“Yes,” he says, and knows that Cas hears everything behind it.

Above them, the stars turn, searing a new path through the night.

 


End file.
